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Canadiens' big win over Detroit exorcises a ghost of blowouts past

The 10-1 victory Saturday night occurred on the 22nd anniversary of the night when Mario Tremblay chose to humiliate Patrick Roy in an 11-1 loss to these same Red Wings

Canadiens' Paul Byron, centre, celebrates with teammates David Schlemko, left, and Jacob De La Rose after scoring against the Detroit Red Wings in Montreal on Saturday, Dec. 2, 2017.Graham Hughes / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Most times, blowouts don’t mean much. They accomplish little except to illustrate the truth of the hoariest maxim in sports: “You’re never as good as you look when you’re winning, or as bad as you look when you’re losing.”

But Saturday night’s 10-1 blowout win for the Canadiens over the Detroit Red Wings might be different, if only because it occurred on the 22nd anniversary of the night when Mario Tremblay chose to humiliate Patrick Roy in an 11-1 loss to these same Red Wings at the old Forum.

That traumatic night led to the foolish trade that sent Roy and Mike Keane to the Colorado Avalanche and the Canadiens into the wilderness. If you’re the sort who believes in things like karma and Forum ghosts and the rest of it, you might feel that now, at long last, the demons from that night have finally been put to rest.

If you lack historical perspective, maybe you can go back as far as two weeks and feel that a different sort of exorcism took place. That was the night the Canadiens followed a home loss to the Arizona Coyotes with a 6-0 debacle against the Maple Leafs, also at the Bell Centre.

That one fooled even an aging scribe who ought to know better. A season that began with a brutally difficult schedule, a defence corps that was slow to mesh and forwards struggling to put the puck in the net had reached its nadir. When I wrote that if the losing went on it would surely cost GM Marc Bergevin his job, my mailbox filled with fans wanting Bergevin’s head on a platter.

The Canadiens played better after that in road losses to Dallas and Nashville, but it didn’t seem to matter. They looked to be the originally dead parrot, pining for the fjords. They were hopelessly buried behind a long list of teams in the Eastern Conference, Carey Price was still hurt, the task appeared almost impossible.

Almost.

Then Price returned — and he was the old Carey Price, not the one we saw in October. Five games and five wins later, the Canadiens are temporarily in possession of a playoff spot. It’s precarious (the Bruins are holding roughly a season’s worth of games in hand), but it’s a position in the standings that appeared unreachable two short weeks ago.

And if a rejuvenated Price is unquestionably driving this bus, the guys who are making it fun to watch are a couple of undersized forwards, Brendan Gallagher and Paul Byron.

More years ago than I care to remember, I was covering a game between the Vancouver Canucks and the Toronto Maple Leafs in Toronto for reasons that remain murky. I can recall only one incident from that game, when the puck stopped in the slot, about 15 feet from the Toronto net. It’s not something you see in the NHL, a puck just sitting there unmolested, but it happened even though there were four or five players nearby.

Then from a dozen feet away, Pavel Bure pounced. With one of those impossible bursts of speed that set him apart from every other skater in the league, Bure beat everyone else to the puck and unleashed a wrist shot for a Canucks goal. These days, when the endless highlight-reel shows reduce your sports memories to a mosh pit, that one still stands out.

I never expected to see that kind of acceleration again and I didn’t — until Paul Byron came along. Before you climb on your high horse and tell me I’m 99 different species of moron for comparing Lord Byron with the Russian Rocket, take a 500-milligram chill pill.

But in terms of pure acceleration, Byron is the equal of any player I’ve ever seen, possibly including Bure. Much of hockey is not about how fast you can skate the length of the rink, but how fast you can cover the distance between yourself and a loose puck — and no one out there is quicker than Byron. For those who love nothing more than to harp on Bergevin’s supposedly endless list of bad mistakes, picking up Byron after the Calgary Flames foolishly put him on waivers goes on the good list. Not only is Byron dangerous, he’s also fun to watch: I’d rather see Byron for a couple of shifts than several games worth of suffocating defensive hockey.

The Canadiens are going to need much more Byron, more Price, more Gallagher, more of Jeff Petry and a defence corps that came together during the six-game absence of Shea Weber. It won’t always be as easy as it was against the Red Wings.

As Byron himself said after Saturday’s blowout, “anything can happen. Teams get hot, teams get cold, but I think we all knew we were much better than the record said we were.”

They were and they are. Not as good as they looked Saturday night against the Wings, perhaps, but definitely not as bad as they looked two weeks previous to that against the Leafs.

Things get tougher with the St. Louis Blues in town Tuesday evening — but the Canadiens exorcised some demons Saturday night. Now let’s see if they can persuade those reluctant Forum ghosts to relocate to the Bell Centre for once and for all.

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